Daily Inspiration: Meet Tali Lehavi

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tali Lehavi

Hi Tali, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Thank you for asking! I have been working on launching a planet made of hearts my entire life. By today I have published over 33, mostly coloring, books from the Planet Heart brand, I have a website with matching clothing designs, and an older website with the blogs. I have more plans for the future. I am back in full action after much of my work was “borrowed” without crediting me. It made me hesitate to spend so much time and money to launch the brand, but I’m very much determined to make it work. I am eager to prove that it is still possible at any age… And I am so grateful that you’re asking me to tell my story. I can shorten the story to make it easier. This version is not the full length but it’s probably too long for your readers.

I should be most famous for being the inventor of the heart hand gesture that I had patented in 2001, and for creating the niche of coloring books for adults, and for all the products that these led to that I foresaw and worked on. (I also invented a few other products that were also taken upon pitching, such as the growth chart toy that you can build as you measure yourself or your pets.). But all these inventions grew out of Planet Heart, which I’d rather focus on. Planet Heart is a positive place that is filled with character education values. I’ve needed to inspire children and so I put all my wishes for how to make planet earth better with an ideal planet made exclusively from hearts. Most of my inventions stem from my path of drawing and inventing Planet Heart!

My story goes back to when I was a little girl and no one had invented a planet made of hearts yet, which just seemed obvious to me that it had to exist. I had cut hearts from gum wrappers, shaped the heart with my fingers at night at multiple orientations, and named combinations of wedged hearts on notebooks. (I ended up creating a secret language-the Heart Pictionary for the eventual fanbase so that all heart combinations in all my drawings would send subliminal and actual positive messages at the same time.) I was always thinking of all the people in the world and, while I knew there were more people than I could cut hearts for, even 5 year old me still felt that I had to try. I knew it’s crazy but I felt like I was connecting with all the many people out there. As Planet Heart was always inside me, it grew as I grew.

Every passing year while carefully looking at the market, I saw that toys were not yet made of hearts, and beads were not yet manufactured to wedge together, and no one yet made a planet made of hearts. It would have required a lot of new molds and new tools. But even on paper, in a two dimensional space that is inexpensive, it seemed to me like everyone was compromising, like they didn’t try hard enough to make the world better—as if they chose the easy way out. They limited their imaginations with obstacles to how wonderful we can make planet earth. They didn’t bother to spend that much time on R&D. I didn’t even just want one planet, I wanted an entire galaxy and then a universe made of hearts. (I didn’t know about multiverses!) I wanted to teach children to not put obstacles to their dreams. I also wanted to create a brand that would stay and not just a quick fad so I thought it was worth investing in researching all my plans for it. I went about drawing the planet on notepaper in college, studying intellectual property, and studying the path to marketing.

By the time I was in college, I had to make my own mock products from scratch, before the days of 3D printing existed. Back then, clothes and fabrics only had hearts sporadically spaced on the fabric but hearts were never linked together. No one ever drew the bottom of the heart to match the top of the heart so that they could wedge! In the meantime, I could envision a television show with the special effects that happen from when the Heartlings would communicate or connect, and all the positive messages that I could convey to the world. I developed philosophies, slogans, and songs of how hearts are meant to connect while keeping their own unique identities, and every new idea led to more stories of adventures for my main characters, the Heartlings, and toys that should exist. Everything I drew led to more and more ideas and inventions that simply didn’t exist in the market.

For example, in the process of creating this planet, I also discovered the benefits of drawing and coloring mandalas with patterns in them. It’s because as I drew my planet, I listened to the many conversations between my right and left hemisphere and all the sensations from the rest of my body in the meantime. It’s before people used the word mindfulness. I could tell when my left hemisphere seemed to judge and repress my right hemisphere. (For example, my left hemisphere thought I was weird for giving heart flowers a bellybutton, and that immediately became a secret button with a purpose on Planet Heart!) I taught myself techniques to relax my stream of consciousness and then integrate the new ideas or doodles actively into the storyline. Then I wanted to teach others these techniques, which are now in my coloring books. So the process of inventing a planet made of hearts is what led me to create the entire niche of coloring books for adults (and children.) This then led me to discover even more sub categories of product lines like the activity books with new spatial reasoning skills like the different styles of analogies. By now I have self-published multiple activity books with analogies in black and white and in color, and other activity books like to Continue the Pattern, or to Find the Missing Heart. The books depend on the fact that the mandalas have a pattern that can repeat in a three-dimensional space. It’s unlike the typical linear patterns that children solve in grade school. It’s also unlike other mandalas that do not have patterns. It’s definitely a unique product line.

While recognizing all these side categories that I wanted to market, I still wanted to create a television show for Planet Heart. But I had been taught that publishing a book first is sometimes the best route to getting a television show off the ground, so I gave my mock book to an entertainment lawyer who supposedly took it to publishers on my behalf- and the surprise bills later took years to recover from. Around 2001, I had pitched the television show as well, but the network’s budget was all for bloody television shows for 11 year old boys. It was a long journey because social media did not exist back then so I had to depend on pitching my work to others.

I tried to pitch other products too, hoping one product would get a yes, through whatever first manufacturer or agent I could find. I just wanted a path to enter the market. Pitching was very tricky because it led the companies to feel “inspired” to do my ideas without me after my pitch, despite an NDA. For example, I pitched a line of kissing fish that connect with a heart between them and the company that took it (after keeping my portfolio for way too long) ended up winning design awards. In 2003, I exhibited at the Licensing Show at the Javits Center in NY. I also went to countless other conventions, and sent query letters to publish my many books, including the pattern books and the story books, and all were rejected.

Before I got my heart hand patent, you wouldn’t believe how many lawyers thought the heart hand was a bad idea. I’ve had several say that the heart should “never be broken”-they didn’t comprehend the concept that it’s a coming together of more than one person, and that we should all connect through love(TM.) It was so important to me that all my characters maintained their uniqueness as they connected through love. I’ve also had people say men would never do the heart hand, so I’ve had plenty of naysayers. But by 2001, it was a solid utility patent which a top examining US patent attorney approved, and by 2005, I used the heart hand in commerce while teaching yoga, always saying it’s my trademark, which I registered as well. My first break was showing it on Channel 3 morning news in 2005.

Around 2008, I went to the Lucky Napkin convention at the Marriott in Scottsdale, and pitched the heart hand gesture. This part of the story is very painful for me. I normally skip it. The real story is much longer. The heart hand was my entire life. It was all I had ever strategized about. It was in all my dreams and all my designs. When I was in college, someone had earned from Wazzup, so I thought the heart hand could be the most identifiable part of my Heartlings. I knew others would copy it, but I wanted it to be primarily associated with the heartlings and only available for licensing. I had a strategy for it.
The story of how this was stolen is worth telling but it’s not for your public right now. It brought out the ugly and that quick buck that I was hoping to fix about the world. Quite the irony.

I’ll just say that it was equivalent in my body to losing a very close relative, or a big part of me. I developed anxiety from just seeing hands, something that I didn’t tell my family. I went from having positive dreams in which I teach others how to fly to having bad dreams about it all the time. I went through all the stages of grieving that someone goes through when they lose a loved one or from post traumatic stress. And mainly, I didn’t see any point in bothering to continue with ALL my plans and inventions. If dotting my i’s and getting the trademarks and patents was pointless, and if big companies can just have bigger lawyers, I didn’t see a point to my many years of R&D. I had a family fortunately, and this allowed me to stay focused on something positive and on keeping them safe.

So after a lifetime of investing in Planet Heart, I went back to focusing on my other passion which was teaching health and yoga. I maintained use of my trademark by announcing it my classes, and I kept creating my heart mandala books. But I mainly focused on teaching yoga and nutrition. (I also claim to be the first to create a food plate when I taught nutrition—at a time when the official guidelines were the food pyramid. And I used the heart hand gesture in all my nutrition lectures in Sprouts in AZ and Ca to teach mindfulness. I even published a health book with the food plate.). Whether I taught yoga or nutrition, I was still using the same mindfulness techniques that I developed when creating the heart mandalas. I still taught my students to take a few moments to breathe out longer than the inhalation, to enter a more relaxed state, relax the stream of consciousness, and listen to their body. These have been a constant whether I teach yoga, mindfulness through the heart mandalas, or nutrition!

In 2023, I participated in a small group training with a coach, Shawn Bradford, to help 4 of us launch a corporate yoga career. Over the 6 months of coaching, I showed her some of my inventions and she loved all of them. I went back to researching how to launch Planet Heart inventions and I think my own heart was healed and ready. Then I showed Shawn my many pattern books with all the heart mandalas. She lit up the most. I think she saw the passion in me and responded to that. The timing was perfect. I had healed just enough. Also, even though by now the market is saturated with coloring books, and most are made by AI, I feel that mine still have something unique to offer, and it’s still my brand. Planet Heart has still not been done, even though so many bits of it have. So I am ready to have a voice and to use it to bring peace, love, health, and all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated to help others stay strong.

It’s actually ironic to me that the majority of the books in this saturated coloring book market were made by AI by people who cannot draw and absolutely didn’t gain any benefit to their own sense of inner peace. I think they would benefit from my guidance as well! I do not use AI. The entire point of my books is for people to listen to their body and to check in and learn about themselves. How you are on paper is how you are in real life. How you make decisions when you color and how you criticize yourself is how you talk to yourself when you are at work.

We suffer as a society from too many opportunities to numb ourselves and to shut off from listening to our needs. Between the endless scrolling on social media, to alcohol and other distractions, to the calls to “clear your mind,” people spend very little time taking time to listen to their body. They listen to influencers. But they rarely check in to hear how they feel. The benefit of “planet building” from scratch without copying others is that I spent time listening within to my circadian rhythms, my back pain, and my whims to color or write or doodle or dance. It’s also how I discovered that the food fads of the 80’s made zero sense. It’s how I learned what is right for me. It’s how I healed myself, too.

While I’ve been healing, the world has since broke out into many wars. I can see my books bringing optimism to children in remote parts of the world. This is who I want to reach. I want the healing to begin with the heart mandalas first, and then with the goals of aiming to do better, because I know we can.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When I began, it was before there was the internet, Amazon, blogging, Youtube, social media, print-on-demand, 3D printing, and so on. I truly had to pick one product out of the many that were all intertwined into this giant vision, and then to pitch the product one at a time. I had to depend on others. Nearly every pitch I ever made led to that company later creating my product without me. I learned that NDA’s are meaningless. I learned that patents and trademarks are also meaningless because the big companies have in-house lawyers.

Today the world is for the taking for people like me. I just have to conquer some skills to learn how to use this new technology!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The main theme in my life is connectivity. This is true about all my work and inventions through the years. Whether I teach people to connect inwardly with their feelings in neuroart workshops, nutrition lectures, or yoga, or with one another through the heart hand, or whether I design art pieces that connect and communicate love around the room—it’s all about connecting.

I am most proud that I invented a gesture for love that is now used by people all over the world. Even though I recently saw a mean dictator’s wife doing it in a photo, it is pretty amazing that I invented a gesture that is used by everyone. Before me, people pointed to the heart to express love. It worked fine, and could be done with one hand. But the concept of the heart being made by more than one item coming together is so symbolic and powerful. I especially love my slogan of “making the negative space positive,(TM)” and I like to use it for my designs for furniture (which I would love to license!)

The heart hand gesture that I invented is a lifestyle brand of connectivity. After years of drawing the Heartlings and products connecting with heart hand extensions out of them, I then created super unique organic shapes and a line of jewelry with “bites” taken out of them. The inventions kept evolving and then became 3D in more ways that I am not going to reveal until I’m ready to launch and I am looking for investors for that. I love that the invention process continues all from one original idea. I never settle, even when I land on a fantastic idea. I love to just say “what if” and then see what else I can invent. I deconstruct, and then reconstruct. It’s a process that happens by actively listening to my own right and left hemispheres and then peeling any obstacles and reaching new concepts.

It’s funny that because I don’t actually know how to draw correctly anatomical hands, when I was drawing the Heartlings, I remembered that I used to make the heart hand with my hands in bed at night, and so I connected all the characters. My limited ability to draw became the gift. I also can’t draw anything else besides hearts. It’s very useful to have limitations.

I’m incredibly creative. At the same time, my creative side used to be ruled by the anal left brain. (This is an issue that is on the rise where less people are using their right hemisphere.). Drawing mandalas exclusively from hearts helped me break out of the self-inflicted repression. I am also not great with decision-making because I can see so very many options at every moment. If I draw a heart in one orientation, I know that it opens up so many new orientations right after and I just want to explore them. Most of the time I cannot predict if it will look great, but I need to test it for myself. It’s why I keep finding new surprising ways to combine the same heart. It’s like a scientific inquiry. However, in the process of doing it, I learn to become a better decision maker because I learn when to listen to my left hemisphere or my right. It’s in the practice of making small decisions and hearing what obstacles I may put on myself that aren’t necessary. I think that I needed to draw heart mandalas to work through my own repression of the right hemisphere and to learn to balance the “tug of war” between the hemispheres, reaching what I call “Hemispheric Harmony” so that I could grow into who I became. It has helped me in all aspects of life.

In the end, I love bringing a sense of awe to others when they see the surprising orientations in which hearts can combine. I get lots of Ooohs and Ahhas when people see my designs!

*One other thing that I am super proud of is that I ran the crafts booth for 11 years at the Congential Heart walk. Everything in the booth was my original designs, like cookie cutters from my original shapes that I had laser cut, laser cut hearts that were of my magical heart that had super powers, and stencils to help children trace. I loved watching how children interact differently with the same building toys. For example, children built with their own style using the wooden hearts. I felt like it was a great way for them to discover their own spatial abilities that they didn’t know they had before.

How do you define success?
I am already happy and make everyone else happy, but it would be nice if I ever get to a point of earning more than I invest financially. My husband and children deserve that much. I have plenty of satisfaction in my every day life. I am so lucky that I can do what I do. I have so many blessings. I draw hearts all the time or teach yoga. There is no greater joy. I am so endlessly grateful. When people make me happy, which I’m overwhelmed by every moment, I feel the need to surround them with hearts and love and I just can’t help but want to thank them profusely. I see beauty everywhere. I see beauty in people inside and out. I see the beauty in nature. I had the luckiest upbringing. My parents were amazing. I have no complaints, and this is pretty consistent–I don’t get ‘bad days.’ I probably have an extra positive gut microbiome. Even when I was a little girl, I didn’t like the expression that the “glass is half full.” I thought that the glass may have half liquid and half air, but that air is also great. I have other examples like this. Mainly, I truly believed since childhood that people mean well (except for the rare sociopaths, but I wonder if that could be healed with fixing nutrient deficiencies). I also always believed that “being perfect is just doing your best.” I’m quite an optimist! So the only neat thing would be if I could actually earn more than I invest because my children need to pay for college. I’ve contributed to many others who were inspired by my inventions. It’s my turn.

Pricing:

• Heart Mandala Online Coloring Circle-$15
• Private Yoga sessions-$150 (but prices vary)
• Coloring books on Amazon-prices vary
• Clothing designs on heartmandalas.com-prices vary

Contact Info:

• Website: https://heartmandalas.com
• Instagram: 88planetheart
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571382600099
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tali-lehavi-2a8a3531/
• Twitter: talilehavi
• Other: https://planetheart.com